Meditations on the bluer faces of ajisai (紫陽花)

Hydrangeas in the Japanese rainy season— and how to practice cooling of the mind.

When we moved to Tokyo, spring was fading. The sakura blossoms had already fallen to the ground in their soft, snow-like way and the days were losing their cool edges. We had been warned that summers here could be unbearably hot and sweaty, but life trots along in funny ways, hardly ever lining up to ‘ideal’ timing. We decided it was better for us to jump into hot and sweaty than not jump at all.

We were comforted by a few thoughts:

—Firstly, there’s the fact that over 14 million people carry on with their lives in Tokyo through the summer months. We’d just be two other bodies doing the same.

—Secondly, how bearable something is often depends on the expectations you arrive with. If you know what you’re up against, it’s amazing what resilience and capacity for joy you find within yourself.

—And finally, a city you are visiting for the first time is full of endless discovery and refreshing newness, no matter the season you arrive in. I’m no less curious about the question ‘What’s it like to live in Tokyo?’ if I ask it in June versus April or December.

It can be helpful to accept that all choices lead to particular challenges as well as particular beauties. It can also be helpful to see beauty as something that is generous and ever-expanding. You tend to find it wherever you’re looking for it.

It’s true, sometimes beauty is handed to you on a silver platter— crisp spring air and a row of trees dripping with blossom, for example. Other times you discover it without pre-warning. Not knowing the shape it will take, or when it will arrive, you stumble into beauty while going about your business. These unplanned moments of beauty are particularly delicious. They are like little secrets the city lets you in on.

When I engage with this kind of incidental, unexpected beauty, it feels less like consuming, and more like communing— something I am intentionally trying to move towards when I travel.

In Tokyo I have learned what it means to be hot and full of moisture. Instead of the parched, thin air of home that leaves everything brittle and faded, the air here is thick and expectant. It gets caught in the upper parts of my chest. It longs to be realised and turned into liquid. Here, I find myself leaking out into the world at all times. My mind is sluggish, my ideas come out sticky. The world in turn sits on me like a salty second skin.

In the hottest part of the day, hiding in the cool darkness of our apartment, I read a novel about a lonely woman living in Tokyo. ‘God, it’s so oppressive,’ one character says to another. ‘And as soon as this oppressiveness is over, that’s when the real hell begins. July is such a horror show.’ It seems that suffering through summer is just part of a Tokyo existence. While I sweat and pant my way around the city, I do so knowing that everyone else is sweating and panting their way around the city too.

The trick is to find things to take refuge in— an icy lemonade, an air conditioned cafe, a shady part of the park. You flit from pocket of coolness to pocket of coolness, and that is how you survive.

Occasionally your eyes will rest on some colour or texture which, without any effort, produces a feeling of coolness inside your mind and body. You must grasp onto these moments with gratitude. For me, it is the soft and cloudy orbs of a blue hydrangea that blow through me like a fresh breeze. They tap into the part of my brain where visions of wide, clear skies and icy lakes live.

Only blooming when conditions are warm and wet, hydrangeas are the sweetness of the rainy season that I hadn’t accounted for. Whether I am sauntering about in a park, zooming along on the train towards some new area of the city, or trotting down to the shops to buy some vegetables for dinner, I inevitably spot a hydrangea bush. I’m not even looking to see them— they leap out at me in their exquisite and demanding way.

These are flowers that want to be looked at. They have something large and loud to say. This has earned them a reputation of uppity arrogance in some parts of the world, but in Japan they are more commonly associated with ideas of family and connection. The little flowers cluster together in a tight community, after all.

Different eyes see different things. Some people claim that blue hydrangeas signal coldness and an icy heart , while others suggest they are the flower of choice for grand gestures of apology. If you really mean the sorry that you are saying, something decadently beautiful is a good way to say it. Like, I’m sorry the summer is so hot. I grew these flowers to sweeten the blow.

Known for their changing colours, hydrangeas are sometimes used as a symbol of fickleness and infidelity. But to me, the ability to change colour seems more like a sign of deep attunement with what’s happening around you. Colours are, after all, one of the primary languages that flowers have to speak with the world they live in.

Hydrangea flowers can be pink, purple, white or green, but it’s the bluer hues that I find most alluring. Blue is such a rare colour in nature that I feel like I ought to pay special attention when it comes along.

There’s no true blue pigment in plants, so if a plant wants to appear blue, it must perform complicated molecular trickery with the red anthocyanin pigments it does have. Since it’s not easy for plants to appear blue, they must have enough motivation to go to all the effort. Colour selection is a practical decision after all— a means to attract pollinators or protect oneself from predators. Beauty, in other words, is a matter of survival.

In order to tell the story of colour properly, you have to stop thinking like a human and get your mind into the mind of a flower. In a flower’s world, humans are mere passers by— sometimes bothersome, sometimes helpful, mostly inconsequential. Most flowers are more concerned with impressing butterflies and bees who will perform the vital work of pollination. There are, of course, some flowers who prefer to be more independent, and can pollinate themselves. These flowers don’t need to impress bees, butterflies and the like and curiously, none of them are blue.

For all my love of blue flowers, my eyes aren’t very good at seeing blue. Not out of any abnormality, it’s just that human eyes in general aren’t that great at seeing blue. Blue is more commonplace in a bee’s experience of the world though. I wonder what shivers of delight run through a bee’s little body when, flying through the city streets, they spot a flash of blue ahead.

If I could speak the language of blue like a bee can, maybe then I’d be able to communicate better with the blue flowers that impress me so. What I do know about flower-talk is that flowering plants talk upwards and outwards to their pollinators while also communicating downwards with the soil. So when you begin to learn the language of flowers, you realise you’re also learning how to speak with the soil (which is itself a vast community of beings).

Some types of hydrangea give away clues about the acidity of the soil. In alkaline soils, they produce pink flowers that teeter at the edge of red, but when the soil is more acidic, the flowers take on purple and blue hues. Being such a wet and rainy country, soil in Japan veers towards acidity and so blue hydrangeas are quite commonplace.

This fluidity of colour is fascinating to me. It challenges the orderly and simplified way my brain wants to classify things. The Japanese word for hydrangea, ajisai, is said to be derived from the word ‘adusai’ meaning ‘a gathering of indigo colours’. This hints at the complicated nature of colour. If you stick your face right up to a cluster of hydrangea flowers, you feel a little silly at having described the flower as merely ‘blue’ when you were standing further away. Up close with a hydrangea, you’re not just looking at blue, but a whole universe of subtle whites, blues and purples that blend into each other with no distinct beginning or end. And the more you look, the more you see.

If you have ever spent time gazing at one of those deceptively simple paintings of a ‘single’ colour in an art gallery, you will know what I mean. If you sit patiently before a wall of blue, and observe what happens to your mind and body, it is amazing what journeys you go on. At first nothing particular may happen but after a while you begin to notice your senses sharpen. Subtle feelings arise, old, forgotten memories play in your mind. Textures you hadn’t noticed before start to jump out at you. You have a sudden urge to lie down or run away or leap up and throw your arms about the place.

We hardly ever go on these journeys because we give up at the first hurdle. To simply sit and watch is difficult, and if we get a whiff of boredom we panic and turn away. I would like to be better at unhurried looking (which I believe is a kind of courageous-looking) and so I am training myself by looking at hydrangeas when I come across them.

In the Tokyo summer heat, looking at blue hydrangeas is both pleasure and survival— it is indulging in beauty and also following the coolness where it takes me.

When a herbalist prescribes a herb, they take into consideration the energetics of the plant. That is, whether the plant is cooling or warming, drying or moistening, toning or relaxing on the human body. In herbalism you’re typically interested in the plant’s actions on the human body when taken internally or applied topically. But I am wondering whether some plants can have an energetic effect when taken by the eyes.

Spotting a flower, even if it’s a little weedy thing growing out of the cracks in the pavement, has an effect on my brain and body. I notice a brightening, a lightening, a surge of energy. Maybe I am particularly sensitive to flowers where others don’t blink an eyelid, but I’d like to believe that looking at a large, flowering bush of blue hydrangeas can be its own medicine— a kind of meditation that helps you cultivate an inner coolness.

Fill my vision for a minute or two with the blueness of hydrangea flowers and suddenly I’m airy, light as a feather. Did a cool breeze blow by just now? I had a muggy brain before, couldn’t make a decision about what vegetables to buy or which stop to get off at, but now— now my mind is as spacious as an eternal blue sky.

It’s not just the showy looks of the hydrangea that impress me. There’s something about the plant that makes me feel a little uncomfortable, the kind of discomfort that’s closely connected to awe. Most species of hydrangea are toxic to humans, and so a healthy level of respect is not out of place. For this reason, the most common way to connect with hydrangeas is to partake of them visually. I was surprised to learn, however, that some types of hydrangea have been used in Traditional Chinese Medicine for thousands of years— the roots and rhizomes of Xiu Qiu (Hydrangea arborescens) and Chang Shan (Dichroa febrifuga), for example, are used to treat urinary tract infections and kidney stones, among other conditions.

In Japan, there’s one kind of hydrangea that is drunk as a tea called amacha or ‘sweet tea’. It is grown in various mountainous regions around Japan, but the village most famous for amacha is Kunohe in Iwate Prefecture. Amacha was mentioned in texts as far back as the Edo Period (1603 - 1868). It’s still used ceremoniously today during the Hana Matsuri or Flower Festival held to celebrate the Buddha’s Birthday on April 8 each year. During the festival, sweet tea is poured over a statue of the Buddha, reenacting the story of his birth when the heavens opened up, bathing the baby in sweet rain.

Amacha is made from the leaves of a type of yama ajisai or mountain hydrangea (specifically Hydrangea macrophylla var. thunbergii, also sometimes classified as Hydrangea serrata var. thunbergii). This type of hydrangea doesn’t have the full bodied flower heads of the hydrangeas I’m more familiar with, but flowers in what’s called ‘lacecap’ form— a sweet cluster of little flower heads in the centre surrounded by a crown of larger, flat-petaled flowers. The leaves are picked just before flowering at the height of their sweetness, are dried in the sun and then moistened and fermented before being dried again.

Amacha literally means ‘sweet tea’, though ‘sweet’ is truly an under-description. Amacha is not to be underestimated. The sweetness is thanks to a compound called phyllodulcin which is around 400-800 times sweeter than household sugar, if you can imagine such a sweetness. It seems hydrangeas don’t only like to show off with their flowers, but with their taste too.

In instructions for brewing amacha that I could find across the internet, there is always a warning to brew the tea weakly. Infuse the leaves for more than 15 seconds, and the tea will be too sweet to enjoy. Even the Ministry for Health in Japan recommends a weak brew of 2-3 grams of dried leaves per litre of water. Although it’s used in tea blends and as a natural sweetener, amacha is generally, and understandably, reserved for special occasions. Its potency makes it a drink to be enjoyed through slow and deliberate ritual.

Sweet tasting plants often have a nourishing and energising effect on the body, building up and strengthening depleted tissues. Could this be what is happening to me in an intangible, spiritual way? I came to Japan feeling weak and burnt out, but as June rolls into July, I notice I’m slowly recovering my strength. Contemplating the blue faces of ajisai seems to be nourishing and replenishing me.

Hungry to spend more time with hydrangeas, I planned a day trip to the seaside town of Kamakura where there is a temple so full of the flowers that it’s nicknamed the ‘Hydrangea Temple’. Visiting in early July, I was perhaps a week or two late to see the flowers in their prime, but on the upside, the temple was quiet, with only a few other people slowly walking the stone pathways and stopping to admire the butterflies.

Though the day was hot, the temple gardens were buried in a shady coolness. A stream flowed through the centre, with large bushes of hydrangea spilling over its edges. A bamboo grove grew in the shadow of a dark cliff face and mossy rocks lined the gentle, winding pathways. The Temple’s official name, Meigetsu, translates as ‘bright or clear moon’. Like perfect little odes to the moon, the many orbs of happy hydrangeas that line the weathered stone paths bobbed their heads as I walked past.

Just as the moon goes through its cycles, and the hydrangeas bloom and fade in line with the seasons, I too feel like I am changing and shifting. The hydrangeas have been my guide. Once upon a time, they were called nanahenge (七変化), meaning ‘seven transformations’. It’s clear they are well versed in adapting to change, taking on new colours as they respond to their environment.

Now, as we head out of the rainy season and into summer proper, the hydrangea flowers are browning across Tokyo. It’s been nearly two months since we moved to the city and even though the days grow hotter and hotter, my mind feels cooler and calmer than it did at first. Things are less overwhelming. I have begun to adapt to life here.

Thanks for reading. Much love from Tokyo x